What PRC Board Members Have to Say

Welcome to the website of the Psychoanalytic Research Consortium!

This site is for anyone and everyone interested in learning more about talk therapy, including any and all treatments for a variety of different emotional or psychological conditions that are based in speaking to one another. We understand this covers quite a lot.

Why do we focus on psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis is the grandparent of most therapies in use today. As a field, it has evolved since it began in the late 19th century. Many of the original insights and the ways psychoanalysis has changed and innovated are relevant to how psychotherapists help patients.

The central discoveries of psychoanalysis underlie most psychotherapeutic benefit. This may be true even in types of therapy that are considered distinct from psychoanalytic ones.

Most research studies have supported the need for intensive, longer-term work to help patients overcome long-standing difficulties in how they are feeling and thinking, and how such thoughts and feelings affect how they define themselves, their relationships, the nature and quality of their work and play, and the degree of satisfaction, purpose, and meaning in their lives.

Advantages of the Psychoanalytic Research Consortium:

We rely on our past collective clinical experience and also clinical research from successful and non-successful psychoanalyses. Throughout this website, you will find annotated clinical illustrations from psychoanalyses and psychoanalytic psychotherapy that we feel usefully illustrate many aspects of how these treatments work.

40 fully recorded psychoanalyses and 41 psychotherapies collected over 40 years by multiple, experienced therapists.

Links to case presentations, which illustrate described clinical principles.

References associated with each section, to further research or other perspectives within a given area.

Use of the PRC Psychotherapy Manual as a means to understand different components of the psychotherapy process.

What have we done and what needs to be done?

Members of the PRC have written the following recent publication to summarize the current state of the field of psychotherapy research and our contributions to it: